


Wednesday at Their Heels

by sheafrotherdon



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-30
Updated: 2005-12-30
Packaged: 2017-10-11 23:37:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/118408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon/pseuds/sheafrotherdon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus hates Wednesdays, and is damned if he's going to suffer through another one by himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wednesday at Their Heels

Remus Lupin hated Wednesdays.

Wednesdays dawned earlier than any other day of the week, breeding petulant, overtired snark among students and staff – the kind most usually associated with Sirius Black after a failed night of stalking the House Elves in an attempt to find the castle stash of peanuts. Wednesdays arranged for calamity to befall innocent bystanders with a determination that rivalled even Peter's avoidance of Ethel Bumpkin's portrait on the second floor (a witch who liked to lecture him on the curative powers of white briefs and pineapple syllabub while asking about his progress in Ancient Runes). Wednesdays brought about dinners concocted from innards – steak and kidney pudding, liver and onions, giblets, blood sausage, haggis and tripe – and welcomed rain like James Potter welcomed farts to breed beneath his blankets after digesting six-too-many brussel sprouts at lunch. Wednesdays made the shampoo run out in the prefects' bathroom, and if Snape was going to bait Sirius into a spitting, whirling, hexing dervish of detention-seeking doom, that was a job for Wednesday too.

Wednesdays were clearly a Slytherin invention.

To Remus' mind, the only thing worse than a regular Wednesday – when double Potions ran long and Transfiguration ended with someone's nipples in a jar – was a Wednesday that fell on the 15th of the month. On the fifteenth, he ceased to exist to those nearest and dearest to his Wednesday-loathing heart.

On the fifteenth, _Quidditch Monthly_ arrived.

It was asking too much, he believed, for the universe to expect him to weather the slings and arrows of Wednesdays _and_ compete for Sirius' attention with 120 pages of glossy Quidditch action. Yet ask it the universe did – with stunning regularity. It was, Remus decided, on a particularly soggy, nipple-hungry Wednesday the fifteenth at five-thirty in the afternoon, high time Wednesday took a sodding great kicking to the proverbial arse.

Dumping his rucksack at the foot of his bed, Remus cast a glance toward the hump of blankets and chocolate wrappers that represented the last know whereabouts of Sirius "Mad Broom" Black. "Sirius?"

"Canons've got a new Keeper."

Remus narrowly avoided beating his head against his bedpost. "That right?"

"Name's Flora McDonald. She's Scottish."

"And here I thought she sounded Tlingit."

Sirius poked his head out from behind his magazine. "Tillywhatnow?"

Remus shrugged. "Never mind. You going down to dinner?"

"Nah." Sirius disappeared behind his magazine again, fingers closed over cover art of the Harpies' new Seeker – a buxom woman whose figure was surely an aero-dynamic nightmare for her team. "Nicked a sandwich from the kitchens. Want to finish this article about the back-end drag on a Nimbus when you're rolling a Buretzsky."

Remus narrowed his eyes. Rolling a Buretzsky – he'd roll him a bloody . . . "Right. Guess I'll just start my homework, then."

The pages of _Quidditch Monthly_ rustled as though they were being held rather more tightly than they should.

Remus hid a smile and reached into his rucksack, pulling out a battered copy of _Most Potente Potions_. He sat on the end of the bed, his back toward Sirius, and leaned against the bedpost as he licked a finger and turned to an appropriate page.

"Moony?"

"Hmmm?"

"You – uh. Wanna . . . see the back-end drag article?"

Remus shook his head, scratching the back of his neck. "Not now. Got two pages of uses for scrumwort essence to memorize by tomorrow."

"Memorize?"

"Hmmm."

"Will you be – reciting things? Aloud?"

Remus looked over his shoulder, eyebrow raised. " 'Spect so. I'll try to be quiet, mind. You've your magazine to read and all . . ." He gestured with a smile then turned back to his book.

Silence reigned for ten more minutes – or at least what silence could endure through the shuffling, fidgeting, and wriggling that emanated from Sirius' bed. Remus absently chewed on the cuticle of his thumbnail, his glee increasing exponentially with every twitch and sigh that sounded from behind him. It was almost sad that Sirius wasn't a harder man to play, or possessed of more complicated kinks than an insatiable lust for bookish sorts.

"Moony?" Sirius' bedsprings creaked and swayed.

"Hmmmm?"

"Is it a very good book?"

"Shhhhh. Concentrating."

Sirius whined. His bed shook as he moved again, then soft footsteps whispered across the stone-flagged floor.

"What's so interesting 'bout it?"

Remus glanced over his shoulder as if startled from a trance. "What? Um – oh. You know. Advanced properties of inert herbological ingredients, added to fusions of alcohol and second-summer wheat – fascinating stuff."

Sirius made a small, feeble noise. "Smart stuff."

"S'pose." Remus turned a page. "S'just potions."

"Mmmmmmph." There was a short pause, then Sirius leaned to snuffle just behind Remus' ear. "S'hot," he confessed, sounding rather embarrassed.

"No – actually you have to keep the suspension below 30 degrees Fahrenheit or you end up with . . . Sirius?" Remus wriggled as Sirius kissed the back of his neck.

"I love it when you talk all that fancy grinding and pestling malarkey," Sirius whispered.

" _Homework_ ," Remus protested. "I have to finish this before . . ."

Sirius plucked Remus' book from his hands and threw it on the bed. "Better things to study," he murmured, threading his fingers between Remus' own. "Like, y'know . . . me."

Remus closed his eyes, savouring victory, hiding a smile as he turned to press his forehead to Sirius' cheek. "You had your Quidditch magazine . . ."

"Pfffft. Quidditch."

Remus slid off the bed, turning to nip at the end of Sirius' nose and slide his hands into the other boy's back pockets. "Well said," he murmured.

"Mmmm, yes. Am _genius_."

"Bloody savant," Remus whispered, rolling his hips to prevent too much more talking.

It was Wednesday, so it figured that Peter would burst in just as Sirius slid a hand beneath Remus' shirt, and James would come back from dinner sporting a smile of shagged-out bliss. It was Wednesday, so it came as no surprise to find the prefect's bathroom undergoing repairs, or to fumble the locking spell on the Charms classroom and end up in immediate detention for flagrant misuse of a desk.

But the best part of Wednesday was that Thursdays came next. "I love Thursdays," Remus mumbled as they reached the Gryffindor portrait hole at midnight. His fingers were still cramping from his earnest application of Mrs McGinty's Best Polishing Poultice to Abner Abersnit's gargantuan trophy for International Seeker of the Year (Under-Sixteen Division, 1942).

"Mmmmph. But y'didn't finish your homework," Sirius yawned as he climbed into the common room. "Slughorn'll have you."

"Didn't have any homework," Remus confessed, following him toward the stairs.

"Didn't – you had Potions . . . "

Remus paused as Sirius turned to face him. "Made it up?" he said innocently.

"Made it – " Sirius narrowed his eyes. "You bloody wanker. You played me with your . . . _book_."

"You were reading your magazine!"

"On the _fifteenth of the month!_. The fifteenth is holy!"

"But it was _Wednesday_ ," Remus shot back. "Wednesdays like to eat me – to toast me on spits! And you were back-end dragging with that buxom cover-witch whose breasts are a _danger_ , a _danger_ I tell you, and . . . mmmph." It was hard to talk when he was being kissed.

The kiss ended somewhere close to the fireplace, wrapped up in the corner of a scarlet rug. "How come you've never mentioned Wednesday before?" Sirius asked eventually, fingers skating up the inside of Remus' wrist.

"Cause it's stupid," Remus said. "It's the sort of thing someone would do on a Wednesday, complain that it isn't Tuesday anymore."

"You – " mumbled Sirius " – are a sodding opera of daftness. An epic with chariots, a Quidditch team of daft."

"I just don't like Wednesdays," Remus said tiredly, too exhausted from polish and much-missed dinners to come up with an argument of greater finesse. "You don't like cheese that looks like tortoises, and I don't like Wednesdays, and James dislikes – "

"Dunno why the House Elves want to cut the cheese into shapes in the first place," Sirius mumbled, distracted. "Melt it, that's the ticket – squish it on bread and in soup and . . ."

"You're hopeless," Remus moaned.

"Wednesdays!" said Sirius, focusing again. "I get it now. I can do better now I get it."

Remus sighed and closed his eyes. "Have to get you a calendar so you don't mix up Wednesday with Sunday afternoon."

"Like I _would_ ," Sirius protested in a huff. "Like I - . . . oh. Like in fourth year?"

"Mmmmph."

"Hmm. Yes. Calendar it is, then."

It was warm by the fire, and it was Thursday, and Remus thought he saw a copy of _Quidditch Monthly_ burning slowly in the grate. "Sleeping now," he murmured, blinking slowly, wrapped up in a rather excellent Sirius-type blanket.

"Here?"

"Mmmm."

"But it's . . ."

"Thursday," said Remus. "Nothing bad happens on _Thursdays_ , you git."

It was a persuasive argument that held until 6.42am. Even then, Remus mused, the bad Thursday seemed to belong Florence Chubb - she who expected an empty common room in which to write her mum rather than a display of Sirius' naked arse as he ministered to a Moony in _flagrante delicto_. "Dorm room?" Remus whispered in Sirius' ear, as Florence shrieked her stunned surprise.

"Definitely," Sirius murmured, and they bolted for the stairs – rather as though Wednesday itself were at their heels.


End file.
